What is forgiveness?

"To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you." ~C.S. Lewis

"Forgiveness is the fragrance the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it." ~Mark Twain

"To carry a grudge is like being stung to death by one bee." ~H. William Walton

"Forgiveness does not mean excusing." ~C.S. Lewis

"Good to forgive, best to forget." ~Robert Browning

"Life is an adventure in forgiveness." ~Norman Cousins

"Take heed to yourselves: If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him; and if he repent, forgive him." ~Luke 17:3

"God's way of forgiving is thorough and hearty,—both to forgive and to forget; and if thine be not so, thou hast no portion of His." ~Leighton

"No matter how deep the stain of your sins, I can remove it. I can make you as clean as freshly fallen snow." ~Isaiah 1:18

"If we confess our sins to Him, He is faithful and just to forgive us." ~1 John 1:9

"I - yes, I alone - am the one who blots out your sins for my own sake and will never think of them again." ~Isaiah 43:25

"I will cleanse them of all their iniquity by which they have sinned against Me, and I will pardon all their iniquities by which they have sinned and by which they have transgressed against Me." ~Jeremiah 33:8

So, I've been a Christian for several years now, and I will be the first to say that I have a long way to go in my spiritual journey and that I have a lot to learn. It only came to my attention last night, though, that there is a very basic concept in the following of Christ that I don't understand. Forgiveness. It's such an abstract concept to me, and I don't think I really get it. I was in my session with my counselor and she asked me why I'm so hard on myself...the million dollar question. She asked me if there was something I had done in my past that I found unforgivable, and if I was still angry at myself for something, and that maybe that's why I keep the standards for myself so impossibly high. My response was just that I didn't know....I've definitely done lots of things I regret, and lots of things that bring up the issue of forgiveness, and lots of things I'm not proud of and that I wish I had never even thought of doing.....but have I forgiven myself? I don't know. What does that mean? How do you know if you've forgiven yourself or someone else? Does that mean that everything is okay now? Does that mean that you should never think about it anymore, and if you do, it shouldn't hurt? I know that in God's eyes, forgiveness is complete and total - He forgets what we have done and separates us from those things as far as the east is from the west. I know that, in my head, but what does that MEAN? And as followers of Christ, how can we be expected to do the same thing? When someone does little things to us, I can see how forgiving and forgetting is possible. When someone does something atrocious and unmentionable to us, though, how can we possibly forget it? And how do we know if we've forgiven them for it?

As an example, my counselor and I talked about something that happened to me when I was 15. Something really painful, which left scars on me that I still have to deal with every day, especially now that I'm married. The memory hurts, and I weep every time I think about it for any length of time or have to tell the story. The wounds feel as fresh as they day it happened, and that was 10 years ago. Do I feel angry at the person who did it to me? I didn't think so, until last night. I had thought I had dealt with it as best as I could be expected to, and that I would always feel a twinge of pain when it came up. As I thought about it, weeping into my tissue and feeling so confused, I started feeling angry again. Does that mean I haven't forgiven him? Does that mean that I'm still carrying around bitterness? I don't know. Naturally, to me, with something like that, it's always going to hurt. I don't know how some things can ever completely heal, but maybe my view on that is because I haven't forgiven him. I told Scott that if forgiveness means that I could sit in the same room, face to face, with the person who did those things to me, and act like nothing ever happened and not feel weird, I have definitely not forgiven him. I would get angry and upset and wouldn't be able to stand it. But I thought I had forgiven him. I don't think about it like I used to, and I thought - I really thought - I was over it. Apparently, though, I'm not.

So how DO you forgive someone? God hears our confessions and responds with the most complete and total forgiveness we can fathom, but I don't know how we are supposed to do that. I want to forget what happened to me, on one hand, but on the other hand, I learned from it and have kinda used it as a springboard. In some ways it's been god that I remember, but in some ways it torments me. So is it really a good thing to forgive and forget? Is it possible for us, as fallible human beings, to do that? I'm struggling with this idea.

If I haven't forgiven him, this could be part of what my problem is. The whole situation surrounding what happened to me presents so many things for me to be scared of.....so many things for me to be anxious about.....so many things to feel shame over. That makes me angry. That makes me really angry, but if I turn that anger inside then it eats away at me. It hurts me, then, as much as the original event. Depression has been called anger turned inward.....and that's kinda what it feels like.

My assignment for myself is to ask God to help me see what I feel, really see what I feel without any confusion or suggestion from anyone else, and to see how that is affecting me. He knows what's going on in my head, even if I don't.